And now:"Save Ward Valley" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
Foes and dump developer say nuclear dump is dead after court
ruling
JOHN ANTCZAK, Associated Press Writer
Saturday, April 3, 1999
(04-03) 01:06 EST LOS ANGELES (AP) -- A controversial plan to
build a dump for low-level nuclear waste in the California desert
appeared dead after a judge ruled that U.S. Interior Secretary
Bruce Babbitt acted properly in rescinding transfer of the site to
the state.
Friday's ruling in Washington, D.C., by U.S. District Judge Emmet
G. Sullivan only addressed Babbitt's reversal of an 11th-hour
order by his predecessor, but both the company that was developing
the dump and opponents said the plan was finished.
``There's no one left in the state as a political figure that is
pushing this dump, and their only hope was that a court would
force that land to be transferred,'' said Daniel Hirsch, president
of Committee to Bridge the Gap, a defendant with Babbitt in the
lawsuit.
``It's over, it's absolutely over,'' said Ward Young, co-director
of the Bay Area Nuclear Waste Coalition, which had also intervened
in the lawsuit.
Gov. Gray Davis' office said the decision was being reviewed but
had no comment.
Joe Nagel, president of American Ecology Corp., which has been
seeking to develop the site through the subsidiary U.S. Ecology,
said he will not appeal the decision.
``And we are not going to press Gov. Davis to appeal,'' Nagel said
from Boise, Idaho. ``I think Ward Valley is over, Ward Valley is
dead. The real question is what is the state of California going
to do next?''
The dump would receive low-level nuclear waste that would be
placed in trenches in the Mojave Desert 18 miles from the Colorado
River. Opponents argue that radioactive material could migrate to
the river and that the dump is unnecessary.
The suit was filed in 1997 by the administration of Republican
Gov. Pete Wilson, who was replaced this year by Davis, a Democrat
who has opposed the plan.
The dispute arose when Babbitt came in with the Clinton
administration and undid the work of predecessor Manuel Lujan Jr.,
who in the waning hours of the Republican Bush administration,
ordered the direct sale of 1,000 acres of federal land in Ward
Valley to the state of California on Jan. 19, 1993.
The Wilson administration and U.S. Ecology then sued Babbitt,
claiming he had violated the Administrative Procedures Act and
asking the court to compel him to transfer title to the land so it
could be used as a nuclear dump.
Committee to Bridge the Gap joined Babbitt as a defendant in the
suit, opposing the sale by alleging that the government has not
complied with environmental statutes.
In his ruling, Sullivan noted that weeks before making the
land-transfer decision, Lujan notified interested parties that the
transfer could not be accomplished before the change in
administrations.
``Then two weeks before the end of the Bush administration, and
two days after receiving a request from then-Governor Pete Wilson
of California to complete the land transfer, Secretary Lujan
abruptly changed position, and took certain actions in an attempt
to complete the transfer,'' the judge wrote.
The judge also noted that Lujan announced his decision hours after
a federal judge in California had orally extended a temporary
restraining order further enjoining Lujan from taking any action
involving transfer of the land.
Attorney Howard Crystal, representing Committee to Bridge the Gap,
said Sullivan focused on that rapid series of events in reaching
his decision.
Sullivan granted the defendants' motions for summary judgment.
``He looked at all the facts and circumstances, everything that
had happened in those last frantic weeks before the change of
administrations and he said that given the circumstances it was
entirely reasonable for Secretary Babbitt to do what he did, which
was to return the status quo to what it had been before Lujan
started trying to accelerate things,'' Crystal said.
